RESEARCH ARTICLE
Serological Testing for Herpes Can Lead to Misinterpretation in Disease Transmission
Craig G. Burkhart *, 1, Craig N. Burkhart2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 3
First Page: 14
Last Page: 15
Publisher ID: TODJ-3-14
DOI: 10.2174/1874372200903010014
Article History:
Received Date: 07/11/2008Revision Received Date: 01/01/2009
Acceptance Date: 05/01/2009
Electronic publication date: 23/1/2009
Collection year: 2009
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Herpes is a ubiquitous virus which can produce orolabial and genital infections in humans. Multiple laboratory tests are available to diagnose herpes infections including viral culture, direct fluorescent antibody assays, molecular techniques, and serology. The use of serological markers has lead to numerous epidemiological studies, but there results can be misleading. Seropositivity merely signifies that a person reacts in a specific type of immunological response to specific viral proteins, it certainly does not rule out the existence of the virus in the host. Serological testing for fungal or most viral infections do not approach total diagnostic accuracy. The numerous herpes transmission studies based exclusively on serological testing and seroconversion (despite being published in esteemed journals) have major deficits and may well not be clinically significant.